Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Anil Dash had a clever and humorous, as well as telling, guide titled, A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide. His advice?
As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type.
I wasn’t even aware that a 2.5 upgrade was on the horizon until I read Anil’s posting. Why on earth do the WordPress people embed a link to the WordPress weblog in the Dashboard if they don’t use it to give people a head’s up? Especially since I gather this upgrade is making some major modifications. Modifications that will probably trash some of the changes I’ve made to XHTMLate WordPress. I am now faced with a decision: do I upgrade to 2.5, and continue to XHTMLate? Or move to Drupal? Or increase my pain, and use both?
Moving to another tool sounds about as much fun as having dental implants. However, now is the time to make this movie if you’re considering it. Though using minor version numbering, from what I can gleam, WP 2.5 is a major upgrade.
For me, the logical move is to Drupal. The tool has just come out with a major new version, which means I don’t have to go through major upgrade blues for a long time. I’ve written in the past about the tool’s support for both SVG and RDF, as noted in the keynote at DrupalCon (thanks, James!). And now Laura Scott writes on the number of women involved with the Drupal development, which I did not know about. Probably because of problems with visibility of women associated with open source, generally. According to Laura:
Part of the problem lies not in macho coding culture, but rather in the woeful state of computer and software education in our schools. Most of the people involved in open source are there in spite of their formal educations (or lack thereof). Computer work is pretty much taught only in Computer Science departments, which usually are subsets of Mathematics departments. Despite the fact that nearly every student will be working with computers in whatever field they enter, they likely will never have even one class where they study any sort of computer science or algorithm theory.
…
Is it any wonder that women especially are not likely to end up in an open source software community? As I noted before, the leading women involved with Drupal came to it from other vocations and educational backgrounds.
I’m not surprised about women coming in from other vocations. I’ve long thought the problem with the Computer Science degree programs in college is that there are Computer Science degree programs in college. I was pleasantly surprised, though, about the significant women’s involvement in Drupal. This involvement becomes yet another reason to make a move to Drupal.
All appreciation to Laura for her kind words about yours truly, I doubt I’ll have any visible impact on the growth of Drupal, and Matt at WordPress will attest to the fact that I can be a real pain-in-the-butt to have as a user. To be honest, I think Drupal, itself, with its forward moves into semantics and SVG and related technologies, and the community around Drupal are what will have a positive impact on the growth of this tool. Enough to be a threat to WordPress? That’s a silly way of looking at it, because there’s plenty of business for WordPress AND Drupal, and yes, even Anil’s Movable Type. Everybody has different needs.
But, oh, I hate having to go through yet another tool switch.
Manilla->Radio->Blogger->MT->Wordpress->Drupal.
In the meantime, if you are a WordPress user, heads up, as change is coming at you. And if you see strange happenings around here…well, come to think of it, you always see strange things happening around my web sites, so, never mind.